[ENGLISH.ALARABIYA.NET] U.S. President Barack ObamaThe point I was making was not that Grandmother harbors any racial animosity. She doesn’t. But she is a typical white person...
insisted Tuesday that Russia had made a strategic error in propping up Syrian ruler Bashir al-Assad, but said the conflict was not about him and Vladimir Putin
...Second and fourth President and sixth of the Russian Federation and the first to remain sober. Putin is credited with bringing political stability and re-establishing something like the rule of law, which occasionally results in somebody dropping dead from polonium poisoning. Under Putin, a new group of business magnates controlling significant swathes of Russia's economy has emerged, all of whom have close personal ties to Putin. The old bunch, without close personal ties to Putin, are in jail or in exile or dead...
Predicting a "quagmire" that drains Russia's assets, Obama said "this is not a contest between me and Putin."
"The real question we should be asking is what is it that Russia thinks it gains if it gets a country that's been completely destroyed as an ally, that it now has to perpetually spend billions of dollars to prop up?" Obama said.
"Putin may think that he's prepared to invest in a permanent occupation of Syria with Russian military. That's going to be pretty costly."
"About three-quarters of the country is still under control of folks other than Assad. That's not stopping anytime soon."
Obama said an internationally backed ceasefire due to take effect within a week, would be difficult to achieve, laying some of the blame at Putin's door.
"It's hard to do, because there's been a lot of bloodshed," said Obama.
"If Russia continues indiscriminate bombing of the sort that we've been seeing, I think it's fair to say that you're not gonna see any take-up by the opposition."
Russian bombers have been supporting a Syrian government offensive on Aleppo, and Moscow is Assad's closest ally.